Today I just wanted to stay in bed forever and not face anything ever. But I had clients, so I had to wake up and face the music.
I’ve been having the recurring feeling lately that I want to run away from my life, live in a small shack near the beach with no one anywhere and just sleep for a thousand days, with some unknown source funding me, and no responsibilities or stresses at all.
I’m not even sleep deprived, it’s not sleep I need, it’s a metaphorical cave to hide when I’m feeling overwhelmed and trapped.
I always thought that when I had built an awesome life where I could work for myself, had an awesome partner and a great place to live with lovely friends that I would stop feeling these
bouts of hide-from-the-worldness.
But to my surprise, my ideal life, which I now appear to be living, has not made those days disappear.
They’ve followed me through my life.
Instead of my old woes about past trauma, and all the things I was missing in my life and feeling insecure or hurt about, I now feel trapped by the responsibility that comes with being a business owner and with having clients and a team of freelancers and a very public blog – you can’t just disappear when you want to, you can’t call in sick just because you feel shitty, because everything will grind to a halt and the FB algy will say see ya later, and then you won’t have any moneys to pay your growing team of freelancers and it will all be over, Rover.
I find myself wondering – is living my purpose really worth the periodic overwhelm and too-much-responsibility-panic? Some days I think YES I wouldn’t want to do anything else. Some days I think NO, get all this responsibility the fuck away from me.
Most days I think, Andrea, stop being a selfish eejit, most people would kill for a sense of purpose and the freedom that you have,
quit your whinging. But the guilt just adds itself to the pile.
External circumstances don’t control whether your mind is in tantrum mode or not.
They don’t give you free rein on positive emotions nor everlasting motivation and inspiration.
And today, despite knowing everything I probably need to do to pull myself out of this mental mess, I chose tantrum instead. I lay on my bed and cried pointlessly for a bit. Then I called my friend and had a tantrum into his iPhone.
All the while I’m not working; continuing my unproductive, demotivated streak from last week, all the while feeling guilty about it.
(Pst if you’re unsure wtf to do when you’re in one of these horrible mental-pickles, this free 6 day mindfulness challenge will give you a few strategies to start with – the challenge is about decisiveness, but the strategies are also incredible useful for taming your mind and not letting it take over your brain).
And all the while I knew the answer, I knew what I needed to do to help myself out of the pickle.
But I just wanted the smug little answer to fuck off and stop getting in the way of my tantrum.
Because life isn’t always about having the answer. It isn’t about having all the ducks in rows and chocolates in boxes.
Our logical mind would love to think that if we just did X + Y then we’d get Z = MC squared = a bloody good life, but Stephen Hawking knows that shit is more complicated than that.
So sometimes, we just have to have a tantrum, get all emotional, have a huge meltdown.
And then, when the dust starts to settle and we’ve eaten all the toast and all the cheese in the house and started on Bloody Good Chap’s salami, we realise that it’s probably a good time to get outside for a walk and get a bit of perspective.
